There is a presently an existing recognition of the need to track assets on an enterprise wide basis. U.S. Pat. No. 6,237,051 entitled “Asset Tracking Within and Across Enterprise Boundaries” teaches the use of a unique code affixed to an asset that can be scanned and inputted into a database. In order to insure the valuation, accountability, and control of Department of Defense property, it has issued “Department of Defense Guide to Uniquely Identifying Items” Version 1.5 which is incorporated herein by reference. As will be appreciated by those skilled in the art, for unique item identifier (UII) data elements to be readable by any reader device, the data elements must be identified so the reader device can recognize what element it is reading. In constructing machine-readable data elements, three types of data qualifiers are being used by the Department of Defense: Data Identifiers (DIs) (Format 06), Application Identifiers (AIs) (Format 05), and Text Element Identifiers (TEIs) (Format DD). In order for
such a system to be successful in practice, there must a system and method for reliably and efficiently determining that a given code assigned to an item is in compliance with one of the several prescribed formats.